Snakes and Ladders, AKA your life

I wrote here recently about a close friend of my son offering him some real life counsel. That was Aiden: learn to accept difficulty without being defeated by it; accept impermanence without despair.

Now another close buddy, Armaan, has added his own small truth: every life is a game of Snakes and Ladders.

(Before I explain this wise fragment of thought, a reflection: when I was their age, I was surrounded mostly by hedonistic buffoons. Reflections on life’s meaning were rare. These kids? They’re starting early. Good. The world needs it.)

Back to Snakes and Ladders, the most honest board game ever sold to children. No skill. No hustle. No strategy deck. Just a square of fate and a plastic die that tells you that you’re not in charge.

You begin full of optimism at 1, staring at 100 like it’s the finish line. And then the game does what life does. It hands you a ladder you didn’t earn. It hands you a snake you didn’t deserve. You don’t control your journey; you simply land where you land.

That’s Armaan’s uncomfortable lesson: the world is not a meritocracy. It’s a board game.

Some reversals are expected. You can feel them coming. The ladder is right there, painted in the bright colours of hope: study hard, practice, show up early, be decent, build relationships. These are the things that, often enough, lift you. And some snakes are equally visible: arrogance, laziness, cruelty, the belief that rules exist mainly for other people. The board punishes those eventually. Not always immediately. But it has a long memory.

The game’s sting, however, is not the expected stuff. It’s the unexpected reversals. The square you didn’t fear. The throw you didn’t see. The phone call that changes your week. The scan result. The reorg email. The friendship that quietly expires. The deal that collapses because someone in another country sneezed and global markets caught a cold.

Then, just as you’ve adjusted your life to a smaller version of itself, a ladder appears. Someone takes a chance on you. A mentor gives you a single sentence that rearranges your thinking. A side project turns into a business. A relationship deepens. A child is born. A stranger helps. A door you didn’t even knock on swings open.

Snakes and Ladders reminds us that drama is not an exception; it is the default setting. Most lives are not steady climbs, but a series of jolts. It’s just that we don’t put that on our LinkedIn banners.

And yet, there’s an oddly comforting truth in the game’s structure: you keep playing. You don’t leave the board because you hit a snake. You slide, you sigh, you laugh bitterly, and you roll again.

That’s a pretty good operating system for adulthood.

For ordinary life, the lesson is gentle but sharp: don’t interpret every setback as a verdict on your worth. Sometimes it’s simply a snake. It doesn’t mean you’re cursed, or stupid, or finished. It means you landed on a square that does what it does. Grieve it, learn what you can, but don’t build a whole identity around one bad slide.

For leaders, the lesson is even less flattering. Many executive careers contain ladders disguised as merit. Right school. Right surname. Right timing. Right sponsor. Right industry at the right moment. You may be brilliant, yes, but you also rolled a few lucky sixes. If you forget that, you become unbearable. You start handing out moral lectures when what you’re really describing is a favourable board.

Humility, then, is not a personality trait. It’s a response to the truth about life.

Not all snakes and ladders are random occurrences, though. Many are made by humans. Our job in life is to build many ladders. And to never be one of the snakes that degrades others.

A toxic boss is not fate. A rotten culture is not weather. A system that humiliates junior staff is not destiny. Those are snakes drawn in by someone with a nasty marker.

There’s another strange comfort in the number 100. The finish line is universal. Everyone gets there eventually. The game ends for all players. That can sound bleak, but it’s also clarifying. If the destination is shared, then obsession with ranking becomes faintly absurd. The difference between a life well-lived and a life merely endured is not who arrived first, but how you moved across the board: whom you protected, what you built, what you refused to become.

And perhaps that’s the best way to play this board: treat your squares as chapters, not as prison cells. When you arrive at a ladder, don’t get smug. When you meet a snake, don’t get haunted. Keep your effort steady, your character steadier, and your sense of humour intact. The die will do what it does. Your job is to keep rolling with dignity.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Your final score is not 100, or the time it took to get there. It’s the spirit you carried with you across the board.

 

Like it? Hate it? Engage here